Heroin a killer that crosses all lines

A killer that doesn’t discriminate by gender, age or socioeconomic status is lurking in the tri-county area.

Heroin, an opioid analgesic processed from morphine, has become a bitter pill for law enforcement and for the users and their families plagued by the devastating effects of its highly-addictive nature.

“We’ve often talked about the fact that if you use this kind of drug you’re going to wind up in jail or dead. There are only two outcomes,” said Montgomery County District Attorney Risa Vetri Ferman. “Once you’re addicted to it, once you’re on it, it is just one of the most difficult things to break away from.”

First Assistant District Attorney Kevin R. Steele said heroin has become “a significant issue” in Montgomery County, and no community is immune to it. “We have seen heroin and made heroin seizures in communities like Norristown, in Pottstown, in Royersford, in Limerick … this is all over Montgomery County.”

Heroin is becoming an increasing problem throughout the Philadelphia suburbs, including the most affluent. In all areas, police officials say recreational use of prescription drugs is leading down a road to heroin addiction.

“Instead of going to a crack dealer on a street corner, suburban kids are getting powerful prescription drugs out of bathroom medicine cabinets,” Chester County District Attorney Tom Hogan said. Chester County defense attorney Thomas Ramsay added that those prescription painkillers are leading youths who use them on a path toward heroin.

In Berks County, Coroner Dennis Hess said opiate overdoses, including heroin and painkillers, “is happening everywhere.”

“The problem is the city, (Reading), is so concentrated, so we get a lot of them in the city, but we get them in Birdsboro, Greenwich Township, Spring Township, all the townships,” he said.

In Delaware County, a Heroin Task Force has been created to combat what District Attorney Jack Whelan labeled an “epidemic.”

With an estimate of roughly 40,000 instances of heroin use by those age 12 and older in the past year, the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration ranks Pennsylvania as having the third highest heroin use in the nation behind California (56,000) and Illinois (41,000).

That estimate is based on data collected by the agency from 2006 to 2011.

‘It gets in you ...chasing it until you’re dead’

There were 40 heroin-related deaths in Montgomery County during 2012, up from 37 in 2011, according to statistics compiled by the county coroner’s office.

“Our office is investigating a few heroin-related deaths per week and they’re from throughout the county,” said Vicki Firth, chief medical investigator for the Montgomery County Coroner’s Office. “We are seeing all ages, all socioeconomic backgrounds.”

Firth, a registered nurse with a master’s degree in forensic medicine, said so far this year there have been four confirmed heroin deaths. Several more suspected heroin death investigations are still awaiting final rulings, pending the receipt of toxicology tests.

Investigators have seen deaths both from sniffing powdered heroin and from intravenously administering the drug.

“I think it’s one of the most difficult and challenging of addictions that people have. It gets in you and then you just chase it and you continue chasing it until you’re dead,” said Montgomery County Assistant Public Defender Hindi Kranzel, a defense lawyer who represents addicts in treatment court. “It controls every single thing that they think, that they do, every action that they take. Every thought that comes in their mind is wrapped around heroin. It’s their girlfriend, their boyfriend, their lover … heroin is their entire world.”

Nikki Golden, 26, of Royersford, who beat an addiction to the drug she once called her “best friend,” recalled her first intravenous use of heroin at 17.

“The first time I did it, I immediately fell in love. It’s instant. Before you’re even done shooting up, you’re high. It was just that rush,” said Golden.

Limerick Police Detective Matt Daywalt said a large number of heroin users pick up the drug at the suggestion of a friend or a significant other.

“Usually it starts with snorting. Nobody wants to inject themselves. Everybody’s afraid of needles. It just grows,” he said. “It’s never somebody wakes up and thinks, ‘Hey, it’d be really good to try injecting something into myself.’”

80 percent of county crime is drug-related

Addictions to heroin and other drugs fuel crime in communities, according to law enforcement officials. Ferman and Steele estimated that between 75 and 80 percent of the criminal cases their office disposes of annually are “drug-related in some fashion.”

“Someone who is burglarizing homes in Montgomery County may be doing it to fuel an addiction because they need money to support their habit. That’s dangerous. People go into a house where someone may be, people could get hurt,” Steele said.

“It begins at home,” said Lower Frederick Police Chief Paul Maxey. “These people are pushed out onto the street because people are tired of them taking from the family…thus it forces them to take on other crimes to feed the habit.”

Roughly 20 percent of the district attorney’s caseload is drug crimes, whether it’s possession or delivery. Another 25 percent of the cases are DUI-related, which includes driving under the influence of drugs.

“So when you consider those numbers, every year, half of the cases that we handle in Montgomery County are directly involving drugs or substances,” Ferman said.

Counting other crimes, such as burglaries and thefts that are fueled by drug addictions, the number of drug-related prosecutions is staggering.

“If I had to come up with a number, I’d say probably 75 percent of the cases we see have some drug component to them,” said Ferman, whose office handled 9,017 adult and juvenile cases to a final disposition in 2012.

“You’ll see them steal things that are easy to re-sell on the street. They’ll sell anything to get these drugs,” said Assistant District Attorney Cara McMenamin, the prosecutorial liaison in the county’s drug treatment court.

“Car break-ins, daytime burglaries, those are the types of things you can almost always tie it back to an opiate addiction, more so than any other drug,” added a county detective. “They’re looking for the GPS or a cell phone that they can drive down to North Philadelphia and beg their dealer, ‘C’mon take this and give me 10 bags for this.’”

Heroin resurging as next step after pills

Once an epidemic in the U.S. in the 1960s, heroin use appeared to subside for a while but local authorities are now seeing a resurgence in the drug’s popularity.

“Right now, this is a very significant concern to us because what we used to see would be pockets of use. We would see individual cases and we would see some heroin overdoses. But we’re starting to see, just over the last six months or so, more of this kind of organized heroin trafficking,” said Ferman, referring to a recent drug bust in Norristown that resulted in the seizure of numerous bundles of heroin with a street value of $17,000.

More troubling, authorities said, is that heroin use is no longer the milieu of the stereotypical homeless junkie on skid row.

“Years ago you would think about a heroin addict as a junkie. You would think about some older person who is addicted to this and they’re kind of wandering around out of it all the time. Now, we’re just seeing a different kind of customer, younger and not necessarily aware of the dangers,” Ferman said.

“I think we’re seeing heroin migrate into the college environment, being used as a party drug by more and more people,” Maxey said. “The effects are devastating.”

Young people start dabbling in opioids, raiding the medicine cabinets of their parents for potent painkillers like OxyContin and Percocet.

“Every case is going to be different. There certainly will be people who try this once and they can become addicted so quickly because it is so potent,” Ferman said. “What we have seen in our county more frequently, is people, especially younger people, who start using prescription drugs. We see a lot with OxyContin. They’ll use that and become addicted to it.”

“I think, with our high school kids, they’re introduced to the opiates,” Daywalt said. “Somebody’s dad or mom gets hurt at work or something, they get the Oxy(Contin) or the Percocet, start in with that, and then they want to try something else.”

“Two things happen. One is that those prescription drugs might become too expensive or difficult to get and they will then turn to heroin, or sometimes they no longer can get the high they want from the prescription drugs and they will turn to heroin because it is so powerful,” Ferman said.

The opioid turned heroin addiction problem cuts across all age and socioeconomic barriers.

“Heroin knows no boundaries, whatsoever,” said McMenamin, explaining she’s seen lawyers, doctors and nurses who have been addicted to opiates and have sought treatment court. “It is a raging epidemic and not in just the population you would assume, the poor, the needy people. Because of the link with oxycodone, which is prescribed, you see this epidemic in the well-educated, in older people who just happen to have a back or knee injury, students coming off of a car accident.”

“That starts this downward spiral,” Steele said. “It’s just an incredible shame to see where these types of drugs take otherwise good people.”

The number of people aged 18 to 25 who in the past month used prescription drugs for non-medical purposes declined 14 percent, from 2 million in 2010 to 1.7 million in 2011, the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration announced in September upon the release of the 2011 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. However, non-medical use of prescription drugs among children 12 to 17 and adults aged 26 or older remained unchanged, according to the annual survey of about 70,000 people nationwide, aged 12 and older.

The 2011 survey also found that the number of people aged 12 and older who used heroin in the past year rose from 373,000 in 2007 to 620,000 in 2011.

“In the last few years there has been a lot of attention on the issue of prescription drug abuse. Many of the most abused prescription drugs are opiate-based. Unfortunately, this is having an effect on heroin use,” said Christopher Deutsch, director of communications for the National Association of Drug Court Professionals.

“When opiate-based prescription drugs become unavailable, some users will move on to heroin to get their addiction. There are many communities that have recognized the dangers of prescription drug abuse and taken steps to reduce it, only to find heroin use increase.”

Kay McGowan, assistant drug and alcohol administrator at the Montgomery County Office of Drug and Alcohol Programs, which provides prevention, intervention and treatment services for county residents battling substance abuse, said the disease affects people from all walks of life.

“It’s not just the poor, impoverished individuals who struggle with this disease. People aren’t born with the goal of growing up and becoming a drug addict. They’re your neighbors, your brothers, your sisters, your children. It’s a misunderstood disease and it’s not a disease of willpower,” McGowan said.

Cheap alternative to other opiates

Opiate pills, such as oxycodone, can cost $30 a pill, or $1 per milligram, when it’s sold on the street. A bag of heroin costs a lot less - between $5 and $10, detectives said.

Typically, heroin is not being sold on the streets of Montgomery County, like other illegal drugs such as crack cocaine or marijuana. Investigators said those involved in the suburban heroin culture are familiar with one another and so one or two might travel to Philadelphia, Reading or Allentown to purchase the drug and then distribute it to their acquaintances.

A bundle of heroin, which can produce 10 to 13 bags, can be had for about $100, authorities said.

Daywalt said that it’s gotten to the point where heroin is actually cheaper than marijuana.

The fact that heroin is odorless also makes it easier to move and elude law enforcement. Marijuana’s telltale scent makes transport more difficult.

Detectives and prosecutors said the Philadelphia heroin trade is known for providing strong and cheap drugs. “Over the years we’ve seen high levels of purity in the heroin that people have gotten from the city,” Steele said.

“Unfortunately, on roads that go through Montgomery County, like the Schuylkill Expressway, we have found that that has at times been a heroin highway,” Steele added.

The drug is so powerful, investigators said, that buyers will inject the heroin as soon as they get it, not being able to wait until they return home to the suburbs.

Steele said there are lethal dangers for youth going from the suburbs to the city to get their fix.

“You may get robbed. You may get carjacked. You may get assaulted. You may get killed. They’re good targets for the bad guys,” Steele said. “They have a target on their backs when they go into those communities.”

Chester County defense attorney Ramsay describes it as “putting their lives at risk to get the drugs that were putting their lives at risk.”

Not knowing the potency of the drug purchased can also be dangerous, said Ellen Unterwald, director of Temple University School of Medicine’s Center for Substance Abuse Research.

“A few years ago, there were many deaths due to a form of heroin with very high potency. You never know the potency of what you’re taking,” she said.

“This drug is pure evil,” said Steele. “The fact it would lure otherwise intelligent people to make these types of dangerous choices should tell everyone not to go down this track.”

Tough messageDeath from an overdose comes from a cessation of breathing, according to Unterwald. “Heroin and other opiates like morphine cause respiratory depression.”

Mixing opioids and alcohol also causes death, according to the Berks coroner.

“When you start mixing them it’s pretty much a combination for death, a cocktail for death,” Hess said.

Law enforcers have been going to schools to discuss the dangers associated with the use of prescription drugs and as part of that conversation have discussed the path to heroin abuse.

“So, we talk about it in a proactive way, hoping we can educate kids and educate parents and school administrators about the dangers of this and let them know this is just something you never want to try because it is so dangerous,” Ferman said.

Coleen Watchorn and Kathy Mackie share the most profound sense of heroin’s reach. Both women lost their sons, Pottsgrove High School graduates Stephen Watchorn and Trevor Mackie, to heroin addiction. They died seven months apart in January and August 2012.

“Nobody is above it,” said Coleen Watchorn, of the pull of addiction. The message “to a parent or a kid of any age (is) that it’s never too late to ask for help … to say ‘Don’t be stupid’ and think ‘not my kid…’ Don’t sugarcoat it.”

“There’s all this talent and it’s being wasted,” said Kathy Mackie of the years watching her son battle addiction.

Heroin “changed who he was, (and) we lost what he could have been.”

Contributing to this report were Mercury staff writer Evan Brandt and former Mercury staff writer, now York Daily Record staff writer Brandie Kessler. References to Chester County are from a Jan. 6, 2013 special report on addiction published in the Daily Local News, stories by Michael N. Price and Michael P. Rellahan. Information from Delaware County is from the Daily Times, story by staff writer Rose Quinn.